Google Ads bid suppression has ended. A target-based bidding change that rolled out on August 17, 2026 makes campaigns marked limited by budget optimise toward their stated target, and early analysis shows median CPCs on those campaigns rose 15.8 percent while overall impression share fell.
If one of your campaigns has been comfortably beating its target for a year, this is the update that explains why performance looks different now. The fix sits with your targets, and it is a decision to make.
Google rewrote how limited by budget campaigns bid on August 17
The change rolled out globally on August 17, 2026 across campaigns showing the Limited by budget status, and the rollout completed on August 27 (Google Ads Help). It applies to Target CPA and Target ROAS across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel, plus Target CPC for Demand Gen. Manual CPC and Target Impression Share are untouched, and campaigns that were never budget-constrained behave exactly as before.
Google's stated reason is predictability. The old behaviour, where budget-constrained campaigns could overperform their stated targets, made results hard to forecast when budgets moved. Two details deserve underlining: the auction itself did not change, and Google does not automatically adjust your targets or budgets. Anything that changes in your account is either the new bidding behaviour or something you did.
Bid suppression was the reason constrained campaigns beat their targets
Under the old system, hitting a daily budget cap pushed Smart Bidding to bid more conservatively, which stretched the budget across cheaper auctions and produced results well ahead of target. A campaign with a $10 target CPA delivering at $5 looked like a masterpiece of account management. Some of that gap was an artefact of the budget constraint.
The numbers confirm how widespread it was. Before August 17, more than half of the budget-limited campaigns in Smarter Ecommerce's analysis were exceeding their ROAS targets, against only 30 percent of campaigns that were not budget-limited, where 57 percent landed on target (Search Engine Land). Overperformance was concentrated almost entirely in the constrained group, which is the tell.
Median CPCs rose on budget-limited campaigns and fell everywhere else
The clearest post-rollout signal is a price split. Median CPCs for budget-limited Target ROAS campaigns rose 15.8 percent after August 17, moving from EUR 0.38 to EUR 0.44, while CPCs for campaigns that were never budget-limited fell 13 percent to EUR 0.33 over the same window (Search Engine Land).
Read the two halves together and the mechanism is visible. Cheap auction inventory that constrained campaigns used to absorb is now available to advertisers without budget limits, and they are buying it at a discount. Advertisers running tight budgets against large addressable demand lost a quiet subsidy. Advertisers with headroom picked one up, which is worth knowing before the next round of automated campaign changes lands.
Impression share on budget-limited campaigns shifted from rank to budget losses
The impression share diagnostic columns moved in a way that makes the change easy to confirm. Before August 17, the median budget-limited campaign lost roughly 45 percent of impression share to rank and about 4 percent to budget. After the rollout, rank losses fell to around 30 percent while budget losses jumped to roughly 33 percent, and overall median impression share for those campaigns dropped from 40 percent to 31 percent (Search Engine Land).
That pattern is exactly what you would expect from campaigns that now bid at their stated target and hit the budget wall directly, where they used to spread a small budget thinly at low bids. If you want a single before-and-after check in your own account, plot Search lost IS (budget) against Search lost IS (rank) across August and look for the crossover. Getting that reporting to hold up over time is a measurement infrastructure problem as much as a media one.
Reading your own account for the effects of the bidding change
Segment by the Limited by budget status first, because the change did nothing to unconstrained campaigns. For each affected campaign, pull a 60-day daily view of CPC, conversions, cost per conversion or ROAS, impression share and the two lost IS columns, then mark August 17 and August 27 on the chart. A step change between those dates is the update. A gradual drift is something else.
Google recommends waiting one to two conversion cycles before judging performance, which matters most for long sales cycles where attribution lags (Google Ads Help). It also does not generate a recommended target for campaigns with fewer than seven conversions, so small accounts get no guidance and have to reason from their own numbers. Feeding real outcomes back into bidding, as covered in our piece on CRM data and lead quality, makes that reasoning considerably easier.
Target adjustment and budget buffer after the Google Ads bidding change
Four options are on the table, and your unit economics decide which one fits. Accept the reduced reach and keep the target. Loosen the target toward what the campaign was actually delivering. Raise the budget where the unit economics support more volume. Or switch to Maximize conversions or Maximize conversion value if the budget is genuinely fixed and you can live with ROI moving around.
Google's own advice is to give budget-limited campaigns a buffer while setting a target that reflects the efficiency you want, and it explicitly warns against applying data exclusions or new bid limits purely as a reaction to the update (Google Ads Help). The honest question underneath all four options is what a customer is worth to you, which is a pipeline arithmetic problem before it is a bidding one. If you want a second read on which campaigns moved and why, we can take a look with you.
